Clubs Losing Their Soul?

I was listning to a friend of mine who is a Watford fan(i'm a Man Utd fan). He was saying how he had lost his personal connection with his club, especially since the current owners have taken over his club.  The amount of foreign players at his club and the fact that at times Watford are used as a feeder club for the other teams which the Watford owners own.

Have any of you felt that you have lost your emotional connection with your club? If so which club do you support? And why have you lost that emotional connection with your team?

This isnt quite answering your question, but on that point, as a Villa fan, will never lose connection with the club.

Owners can be a pain in the backside thats for sure.

Managers to.

I have been annoyed with the club at times as im sure alot of fans have been.

Like Watford, we are a feeder club and its not good.
We have had some poor players and managers over the years.

I love Villa and being a fan. We have some great fans and have had great times on away games eg.

We have some sad fans to.

Im the type of fan who takes a few days sometimes to get over a loss.

Ill never lose the connection with Villa, but having said that, i have lost connection to football in general.

The money has made it incomprehensible now, go back a few years and O'Shea, Brown, Evans and Fletcher were seen as important squad players but nowadays they wouldn't have got a look in initially. It's only going to get worse and the days of the bigger clubs giving youth a proper chance are well and truly gone, the youth set ups are what make the teams what they are, we (United) are just a franchise like City, Chelsea, Madrid, Barca, Juve and Bayern.

Has the team I support lost its soul?

Not at all, but then it is a proper non-league club, with a healthy amount of local players. Suspect I'll be popping down the road tomorrow for a bank holiday home game, kicking off at three, parting with a tenner, sitting or standing pretty much anywhere I please, eating a proper Cornish pasty, and watching the team I hold dear stuttering to a dismal defeat.

Probably a different experience to your average City or Madrid fan, granted, but I wouldn't have it any other way!

Yep. RealMa lost its soul. Mind you, given our links to Franco, it wasn't a particularly pretty soul, but it's gone. Started when we sold our training complex. Needed to, of course, but it started the chain reaction. Even the watered down attempt of bringing in one Local boy to go with the Galactico has fallen away. The pressure for immediate success is too huge

Apparently we never had a soul to lose........

Tough one. I do despise the whole "sky era ruined everything" line because football is an incredible sport and different doesnt always mean wrong. The transfer market is probably a whole different ball game, and whilst fans bemoan losing their links to the men on the field and the men in charge, they give these figures no desire to be close to them. Standards are different in the fanbase, on the field, in the media.

I also would guess my opinion on West Ham and its soul will be different to that of an older generation. I only really remember being sad when one manager left, too young really to buy the good and the bad of Arry, and that was Pards. But before then our record with managers was fantastic, and a lot of people are saddened by how transitory managers are. Throughout the tumultuous relationship Sam had with the fans, I won't have been alone in feeling a bit bleak about sacking a manager who didn't need to be sacked. Equally, loyalty to players is nothing like what it was, but then their loyalty is easily questioned too.

There's still a lot to feel connected to with West Ham. There are still locals boys in the team, the academy still has the stamp of Tony Carr on it (the man who brought through Rio, Joey, Carrick et al), but with him getting older and less involved with every tiny aspect I think some feel Terry Westley doesnt have the heart of the club ingrained into him like Tony did, evidence being the amount of people who have alleged his son is given extreme preferential treatment without the talent to back it up.

The last scraping of soul will probably be taken away when we move. The older fans than I will say the minute we moved the pitch away from the East Stand was the minute we lost the real feel of the Boleyn Ground, but leaving the old place will hurt a lot. Its been a family connection, the place of friendship, the place many like myself learned to really fall in love with football. Memories will be all that are left and I think it will have a profound impact on some of the older fans. To go to a shiny new stadium that we don't own will probably take a huge chunk of the fun out of being a West Ham fan and it will take a lot of getting used to. Frankly, the media probably don't realise that their onesided attack of the tenancy is building a bit of an us and them mentality that will arguably make more people like the place. I have my reservations and refuse to pay even a deposit on a really well priced season ticket because not being able to see the sightlines till I go and take a meeting after my deposit is taken is just a bit much for me.

It remains at West Ham, but for those who only go at home I think it will at the very best slip into a coma for a while. Away fans carry on the soul in many ways because they run their own show.

To make a point, however, this isn't just a Premier League thing, nor even a professional club thing. Both Histon and Cambridge United have changed hugely chasing the money. Every club worth supporting will inevitably have someone in charge who will make sacrifices to claw their way to more profitable leagues. Histon went from letting my mate do the announcements cos he was local and did the DJing on game days to getting in a radio personality because they'd had some TV exposure from beating Leeds. So desperate were they to keep their run of promotions going that when they hit a level they couldnt outspend they also couldnt afford to standstill.